One of the cool features about the new DivShare Direct is that, unlike your standard web host, we want your site to get popular. That’s why we’ll never shut down your account, even if you go over your Direct Data Transfer limit for the month. Instead, your Flash will just revert back to carrying the DivShare logo, and your direct links will bounce to a Download page before launching the file. This way, when you get Dugg, your media will never go down!

We’re changing the world of web hosting, one small step at a time. Hit us up in the comments with more suggestions and ideas.

The new site is rockin’ and rollin’. Thanks for the awesome comments in the last post, and keep ‘em comin’ as you explore all the new features. And don’t miss the killer app inside DivShare Direct — you can now customize your Flash players with your own logo and site link, keeping your name in the limelight when you post videos, audio and slideshows around the web.

We’ll blog in more detail about each feature tonight and throughout the day tomorrow. Stay tuned!

It’s a big day for DivShare — we’re nearing our six-month anniversary, and in that time we’ve built a base of more than 75,000 members who have uploaded nearly a million files. Tonight, we’re proud to introduce a brand new version of the site — redesigned, packed with new features and improved all around. We’re launching at midnight ET.

The biggest news is our new premium plan, DivShare Direct. It allows you to link directly to your files — with no download pages — and provides an unparalleled level of customization for the Flash video, audio and slideshow players you can embed on your own site. Plans start at less than 5 bucks a month, and include all our current premium upload features, like 2 GB file size and FTP access.

We’ve also done a full redesign of the site, focusing on simplicity and usability the whole way through. As part of that mission, a few features have been retired — most notably groups, profiles and inboxes/favorites. We’re also adding a bunch of options to the dashboard to keep you organized — you can switch to icon and thumbnail view, sort your folders alphabetically, and browse automatic categories like Images, Documents and Video. The new design, improved organization and awesome new premium options really move DS toward our goal in life: to be the smart, simple web host for everyone.

Stay tuned tonight for the launch and all the details on the new features. In the meantime, drop us an e-mail or comment away with any questions. See ya tonight!

We’ll be adding some more storage space to one of our servers tonight, so the Hera server will be offline for about an hour starting at 9 PM ET. You will still be able to access the site and download files from the other servers during this time, and we’ll make the upgrade as quick as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Update: All set!

As we’ve mentioned briefly in a few posts, we are working on a ton of cool new upgrades to DivShare. The new features are going to rock your world, the new design is the hotness, and a bunch of other changes will simplify the site and focus on what DivShare does best: easy web hosting for everyone. Today, we’re giving you a preview of a few features from the current version of DivShare that will be lessened or removed in our big update — this will provide you a simpler, easier-to-use application, without a lot of the bells and whistles that haven’t been adopted en masse by our members. Here’s the lowdown:

Profiles and Friends: We’ll be removing the DivShare profile pages, and the connections you’ve made with DivShare friends. We love social networks, but we’ve found that these features have added unnecessary complexity to the site without a big payback in added functionality. As you’ll see, a big part of this redesign is going to be eliminating features that no longer fit our core mission to be the fastest, simplest host on the web. Our new features will all focus on that idea, and we’ll release the details on those over the next couple days.

Groups: While groups are also a really cool idea, we’ve done a lot of research and found that only a handful of them have really gelled into the large, vibrant sharing communities. For those of you who have very active groups, we’ll work with you to make the transition as smooth as possible — feel free to drop us an e-mail with any questions you have along the way. Over the next week, we’ll be phasing out the creation of new groups, and then phasing out the ones that are currently online.

We’ll also be changing or eliminating a few smaller features, like comments, inboxes and favorites, that don’t get a lot of use or don’t fit in with our larger vision. In all of these cases, our support team will be able to help you retrieve any data or files you might have had stored as a part of any of the features that will be retired. We’re expecting all this to take effect toward the beginning of next week.

So, what’s in store for the future? We’ve got some really cool new features for our Flash players, and new options that will allow you to link directly to your files without going through a download page. We’ll be hard at work on the new stuff all weekend, so let us know if you have any questions, and stay tuned for more Version 2 launch news!

Great news! Tonight we’re rolling out a redesigned Flash MP3 player and some cool tweaks to the video player that will make your DivShare embeds even better. We’ve also got some really cool stuff in store for you over the next week in this department, so stay tuned. First up, the new MP3 player:

Obviously the visual redesign brings it in line with our Flash video design, which is cool. Behind the scenes, we’ve also dramatically simplified the embed code, which will make it a lot easier for you to add the audio player to your site. And we’ve also added an option that makes it easy to grab the embed code from the Flash player — just click that “< >” icon to copy the code to your clipboard for transfer to another site. (We also know that a few people might not want this feature, so we’ll be adding an account preference to disable it tomorrow.)

Next up, videos. We’ve added the automatic embed code here as well and spruced up some of the other functionality for some added hotness. Here’s an example from our friends over at GnarStar.tv:

As you can see, the new embed code tool is in there too. Also, for both players, you can add the autoplay feature very easily, and there’s a lot less code to parse through. Just find this snippet, which appears in the code twice —

http://www.divshare.com/flash/video?myId=669729-226

Then add &autoplay=true to the end.

We’ve also got a new Flash slideshow embed cooking, so we’ll release that over the next couple days. Stay tuned for a ton of upgrades, a redesign, new features and new premium options soon. And if you visited the site in the last 24 hours, thanks for being a part of DivShare’s highest-traffic day ever. Happy uploading!

We’ll be doing another quick round of upgrades on our main server today at 5 PM ET. The site will be down for about 15 minutes, and we’ll post a message on all the site’s pages shortly before going offline. Sorry for the inconvenience, and we hope you enjoy the faster DivShare once we’re done!

Thanks to a tip from one of our users, we’ve located and patched a potential security hole in one of our most popular offerings, the DivShare Uploader Plugin for Wordpress. Because the way your account is verified has changed, you’ll need to upgrade to version 1.1 immediately to continue using the plugin. Here’s the download link:

» DivShare Uploader 1.1 (DivShare_Uploader_-_V_1.1.zip)

To upgrade from version 1.0, simply unzip this file and overwrite the two PHP files — dashboard.php and divshare_upload.php — in the directory where your plugin is located. If you need any additional help, drop us an e-mail at support@divshare.com. In regards to the security issue, we won’t go into too much detail because we don’t want to make things easier for any potential bad guys, but we can say that the hole is completely closed (regardless of your plugin version) and we have no reason to believe that anyone’s account was accessed without authorization. No passwords have been jeopardized, either.

You’ll also notice an added layer of security — if you’re not already logged in when you start using the plugin, you’ll be prompted to do so. This is just one more way to help us verify that you and only you can view the dashboard feed that gets sent to your plugin. All in all, we don’t believe that this problem was widespread or that anyone malicious was aware of it before we were. Drop us an e-mail if you have any questions, and stay tuned for more big updates this week.

Update 2: All done! Thanks for your patience.

Update: We’re going to move this maintenance up to 5 PM, and it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.

Quick maintenance update: We’re bringing in a new database server tonight, so we’ll need to turn the whole site off for about 15 minutes while we move all our data over to the new server. During this time, all the pages of the site will show a friendly “we’ll be right back” message, and the total downtime shouldn’t be more than a few minutes.

In other news, we’ve got some awesome new stuff in store for you over the next week or so, and we’ll be introducing a new design and a much simpler, more powerful version of DivShare. Stay tuned!